


Breathing Lessons From the Dead

by NicoTeardrop



Series: Nellie's Bad Day [1]
Category: Alien Quadrilogy (Movies), Alien Series, Alien: Isolation (Video Game)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-10
Updated: 2020-03-10
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:46:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23093533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NicoTeardrop/pseuds/NicoTeardrop
Summary: A quiet moment with Hark Guinness, science officer on the Seegson Corporation deep-space survey ship,UASS Nellie.  He's not feeling so good.
Series: Nellie's Bad Day [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1659787





	Breathing Lessons From the Dead

Last thing I remember is a flash of something like a hand. Then, as the pain and dried blood confirms, I hit my head on something hard on the way to the floor. My throat hurts, mouth is dry. Parched. No idea how long I was out. I’m on a bed in the quarantine bubble in med bay. Clean white walls. One-way windows in a semi-circle, so I’m semi-surrounded by my reflection. Still wearing my coveralls. Boots are gone. Watchcap stuffed into a hip pocket. Lengthwise hole on the front patched with the terminal green Seegson logo.

Take a deep breath. Chest is sore. Bruised. There’s no faucet or terminal in here. Nothing but the bed, the mirrors, and the door. Closest access to APOLLO is in the room outside this little blister. No light controls. Those are in the outside room, too. Streak of blood on the matte white floor in between me and the door. Good bet it’s mine when they dragged me in here. Winship? Hell, if I was out cold, Schenk could’ve done it. I can still feel the distant thrum of the engine three decks and half the ship away. We must be under thrust. My name tag in the mirrored window: ssenniuG. There’s blood on my coveralls, too. Mine, too, I guess? Fucked if I know. I’m pretty clearly concussed. 

Starting to get a touch claustrophobic. My ragged, bloody shape in the one-ways, it’s like I’m staring at me all the time from three different angles. Chmela’d picked up a SOS from a Dub-Y tug. No vocal, just the beacon. Ship was the Yamada, longhaul cargo tug out of the 3WE. Back of my skull throbs. Sends lashes of ache into my eyeballs. Another deep breath, 4 count in, 8 count out, and there’s a brief, definite flutter in my chest. Like a moth against the lamp shade. No lamp here. Just my lungs and sternum. 

I’m crusted with blood. They didn’t take time to clean me up before they dropped me on that bed. Pillow is stained dark. Sheets less so. Almost pink. Is that wooziness from blood loss? Christ, my skull is hammering. Flutters again. When I was a kid back on Earth, I took in a kitten with a moth larva in its neck. I saw it squirm through the perfectly round hole in the kitten’s skin. This is like that. Unzip my boiler suit, check my chest. No perfectly round hole. Remember years before the kitten and caterpillar, fly strike on a whole kindle of kittens. I remember the maggots moving under their skin and how I’d had to break each of their necks before I buried them in the front yard. 

The moth in my chest thumps against my sternum. Something tightens around my fifth rib, and I drop to the floor as a tiny hydraulic bolt punches through my sternum. Blood arcs from the naked wound and I start screaming. It feels like an eternity before I black out.


End file.
